Max Holloway: death by three-quarters of a thousand cuts
Every fighter has a best performance. Not every fighter's best is arguably the best of all time. I break down Max Holloway vs Calvin Kattar.
At UFC 300, Max Holloway will make his second foray into the wilderness that is the UFC's lightweight division. A four-time champion down at featherweight (plus one interim title win), Holloway’s claim as the best 145er of all-time is disputable only because he happened to share his division with two other bonafide all-time greats, Jose Aldo and Alexander Volkanovski. Max fought both, five times in total. In addition, he has shared the Octagon with Conor McGregor, Charles Oliveira, Anthony Pettis, Frankie Edgar, and Dustin Poirier (twice)—not to mention myriad other phenomenal foes. For four years, 2014 through 2018, Holloway was undefeated, despite managing to pack into that period an incredible 13 fights against 12 different opponents. 10 of those wins were finishes.
Max Holloway is one of the greatest fighters in MMA history, pound-for-pound. No question.
I thought long and hard about the best way to analyze Holloway’s style ahead of his meeting with Justin Gaethje at UFC 300. The trouble, as you may well guess, is that there are just so many incredible fights from which to choose.
Then it hit me: there is, in fact, only one Max Holloway fight; one fight that exemplifies everything that makes Holloway such an unparalleled threat; one fight that illustrates the unique blend of savagery and professionalism that brought Holloway to the title and beyond; only one fight that tells you everything you need to know about who Max is, what he does, and why he is so great. His magnum opus.
That fight is Holloway’s 2021 beatdown of Calvin Kattar. In it, Holloway set the record for most significant strikes thrown in a single fight at 746, of which an astounding 445 landed. It is a record that may never be broken, not only because there isn’t a single other fighter who can do what Holloway does, but also because there are very few opponents who could withstand such an onslaught as well as Calvin Kattar. Kattar is not a bad fighter by any means, but in this case he had the unfortunate distinction of being the best blank canvas Max Holloway could have asked for.
Justin Gaethje is no blank canvas. But if Holloway does manage to beat him, there may be a few seeds of the winning approach to be found in this, the fight that transformed Holloway from an all-time great into a living legend.
Let’s dig in.
Round 1
Max Holloway is an avalanche. He starts slow—comparatively speaking, at least—but inevitably works his way up to a blistering pace that only a very few opponents have ever been able to handle.
Against Calvin Katter, Holloway did not start all that slow. But he was cautious, in his way, prioritizing speed over power, and the gathering of information over the delivery of damage. It started, as always, with the jab, and built from there.
The sequence starts with a neat little trick which I wrote about in my Steve Erceg breakdown. Max pops out a jab, without any real intent to land. Less than two minutes into the fight, he has already picked up Kattar’s tendency to catch jabs with his right hand. With that in mind, Holloway actually fires the jab directly into Kattar’s palm, encouraging him to reach for it. Kattar obliges. Holloway follows up immediately, stepping in with another jab—but this one is only a feint. As soon as Kattar’s right hand comes out, Holloway loops a tight left hook through the hole behind it.
Kattar is sharp: he gets his right hand back in time to stifle the hook—but Holloway isn’t done. He follows the hook with a right hand, which sneaks past Kattar’s guard from the other side. Kattar tries to reset, but Holloway stays right on him. Another jab feint draws an even more dramatic overreaction out of Kattar than the previous attempt, but Holloway isn’t interested in pursuing the same idea twice in a row. He feints yet again, flashing the jab in Kattar’s face, drawing his eyes upward just before he drops down to wrap a right hand around Kattar’s elbow before popping yet another jab in Kattar’s grill just to keep him honest.
Many MMA fighters are capable of finding such ideas in isolation. The hook-off-the-jab is a pretty basic boxing trap, all things considered. Following a jab upstairs with a right hand to the body is no more complicated. But very few fighters have the mental wherewithal to look beyond the initial idea. Most fighters set a trap, and spring it. Either it works, and they get a little dopamine reward for their cleverness; or it doesn’t work, and they reset to think of something else. They fail to see that the success of such an idea has very little to do with whether or not they succeed in landing their sneaky little punch—a trick which, at the end of the day, is but a single tactical skirmish in the vast, all-fronts war of strategy.
Take another look at the sequence above. What is gained? Very little, materially. All told, Holloway only connects with the two right hands, and neither lands with much authority.
But what is Kattar doing during all of this?
Defense. Just defense. He offers no feints of his own, throws no counters, forces no reactions out of Holloway. 90 seconds into the fight, and he is already struggling to keep up with the hailstorm of punches coming at him, most of which aren’t even meant to land. In a way, that’s even worse. Eating a clean punch would be painful, but it would also constitute some release of the tension which Holloway builds, and builds, and builds. Dealing with that tension is worse than painful; is stressful. As they say in chess, the threat is stronger than the execution.
Holloway spends most of this first round doing two things: 1) testing Kattar’s defenses, generating attacking ideas to be used later in the fight, and 2) building the initiative that will make those attacks possible.
I have written a lot about initiative on this newsletter in the short time since my first post, and all of that feels like necessary build-up to this piece. Because initiative, above and beyond everything else, is what makes Holloway’s game tick. The fact that Holloway spends the early rounds of a fight feinting, prodding, goading his opponent into an ever more completely reactive state is why so many of his opponents end up looking like drowning victims.
Holloway also occupied himself punishing what offense Kattar did manage to produce. Here he works on taking away the low kick which Kattar clearly prepared as a way of dealing with Max’s deadly jab.
Once again, there are no singular ideas. Holloway might have tried simply countering the low kick with a right hand, but he doesn’t. He first cuffs Kattar on the ear with a left hook. Not only does this little slap convince Kattar to maintain the high guard he has already thrown up, thereby opening up the body shot, but it also buys Holloway the time he needs to get his feet back in order after the low kick upsets his balance. Again: initiative. Holloway is always, always seeking the initiative, earning himself precious moments in which to make positional adjustments.
To that end, Holloway follows the counter with more pressure. Kattar did land the low kick, after all, and Max cannot afford to let that go. He understands that pressure is the enemy of the kicker—knowledge that should come in very handy against Gaethje.
Kattar shows that the pressure is having an effect when he tries to back Holloway off with a long jab. Too long of a jab, as it turns out: Holloway evades it with a subtle slip-and-parry before countering once again with another layered attack. Having overcommitted once, Kattar overcommits again in his attempt to get away, leaping backwards as Holloway pops a jab in his face. Kattar’s left hook is a flailing mess because he is totally out of position, but it’s a non-issue: Holloway drops underneath to stab Kattar in the gut with another jab, before finally spinning Kattar’s head around with a right hand over the top.
Layers upon layers. Holloway throws everything in combination, frequently peppering those combinations with feints. He threatens with both hands, from every angle, targeting the body and head in nearly equal measure.
But remember: this is the feeling-out phase of the fight. Holloway is just gathering data.
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